Henri Matisse

Henri Emile Benoit Matisse was born on December 31, 1869, in Le Cateau-Cambresis, a small textile town in the Nord department of northern France ^[1]. His father, Emile Hippolyte Matisse, ran a grain and hardware business in nearby Bohain-en-Vermandois, where the family settled shortly after Henri's birth. His mother, Anna Heloise Gerard, came from a family of tanners and painted porcelain as a hobby, an early domestic contact with color that biographers have noted in accounts of his childhood ^[2].

Nothing in his upbringing pointed toward art. Matisse studied law in Paris, passed his qualifying examination in 1888, and returned north to work as a clerk in a law office in Saint-Quentin ^[1]. The turning point of the standard Henri Matisse biography arrived in 1890, when he was about twenty years old and recovering from an attack of appendicitis. His mother gave him a box of paints to pass the time during the long convalescence. He later described the discovery of painting as a kind of liberation, and from that point his commitment never wavered ^[2].

Against his father's wishes he abandoned the law and moved to Paris in 1891 to train as a painter. He enrolled at the Academie Julian under the academic painter William-Adolphe Bouguereau, an arrangement that suited him poorly, and soon found a more sympathetic teacher in Gustave Moreau at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts ^[3]. Moreau encouraged his students to copy old masters in the Louvre while developing their own temperaments, and Matisse absorbed both lessons. His earliest works were dark, carefully constructed still lifes and interiors in the Flemish and French traditions ^[1].

The 1890s were years of slow, methodical growth. Matisse exhibited at the Salon de la Societe Nationale des Beaux-Arts in 1896 with modest success, and a summer in Brittany introduced him to painting outdoors and to the brighter palette of Impressionism ^[3]. A purchase that strained his finances proved decisive: in 1899 he bought a small Cezanne painting, Three Bathers, from the dealer Ambroise Vollard. He kept it for nearly four decades and repeatedly said it sustained him through his most difficult years before donating it to the Musee du Petit Palais in Paris in 1936 ^[2].

A summer spent painting with Paul Signac at Saint-Tropez in 1904 pushed him toward divisionist color theory, and the following summer at Collioure, working beside the younger painter Andre Derain, he broke through to something new. The canvases the two men sent to the 1905 Salon d'Automne in Paris used color at full intensity, freed from any duty to describe what the eye actually saw. A critic, Louis Vauxcelles, remarked on a conventional sculpture displayed among the paintings, calling the room a cage of wild beasts, fauves in French, and the name stuck ^[4]. Fauvism made Matisse notorious almost overnight.

His Woman with a Hat, a portrait of his wife rendered in slabs of green, red, and violet, drew ridicule at the 1905 Salon but was bought by the American writer Gertrude Stein and her family, who became early champions ^[4]. Anyone asking who was Henri Matisse in the Paris of 1906 would have received sharply divided answers: to conservatives he was a charlatan, to a small circle of collectors he was the most daring painter alive. Works such as Le Bonheur de vivre (1905 to 1906), now in the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, confirmed his ambition to build monumental compositions from arabesque line and saturated color ^[5].

The decade before the First World War produced many of the works on which his reputation rests. The Russian textile merchant Sergei Shchukin became his most important patron, commissioning the great decorative panels Dance and Music, completed in 1910 and now held by the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg ^[6]. In these paintings Matisse reduced his means to three colors, a blue sky, a green earth, and red-orange figures, and demonstrated that radical simplification could carry enormous emotional weight. The Red Studio of 1911, in which an entire room dissolves into a single field of Venetian red, hangs in the Museum of Modern Art in New York and is often cited among the most influential paintings of the century ^[7].

Any list of Henri Matisse achievements has to range beyond painting. He was a serious sculptor, producing the four monumental Back reliefs between 1909 and 1930, and an accomplished printmaker and lithographer whose graphic output runs to hundreds of images ^[1]. In 1908 he published Notes of a Painter, a short statement of principles in which he described his hope for an art of balance and purity, and for a time he ran his own academy in Paris, teaching international students drawn by his reputation ^[3].

Trips to Algeria in 1906 and to Morocco in 1912 and 1913 enriched his palette and his repertoire of patterns, textiles, and screens, elements that dominate the sumptuous odalisque paintings of his Nice period in the 1920s ^[5]. Recognition followed: he won the Carnegie International prize in 1927, and major retrospectives in the 1930s, including one at the Museum of Modern Art in 1931, secured his standing on both sides of the Atlantic ^[7]. In 1930 the collector Albert Barnes commissioned a mural on the theme of the dance for his foundation near Philadelphia, a project that pushed Matisse toward the flat, cut-paper working methods of his final years ^[5].

Matisse married Amelie Parayre in 1898. She was a steadfast partner through the years of poverty and scandal, modeling for many early paintings and at one point running a hat shop to support the household ^[2]. The couple raised three children: Marguerite, Matisse's daughter from an earlier relationship with the model Caroline Joblau, whom Amelie embraced as her own, and two sons, Jean and Pierre. Pierre Matisse became a prominent art dealer in New York, where his gallery introduced American audiences to European modernists ^[2].

The marriage ended in separation in 1939, after decades in which the painter's studio assistant and secretary, Lydia Delectorskaya, had become central to his working life ^[2]. The war years brought further trials. Matisse remained in the south of France during the German occupation, while members of his family joined the Resistance: his wife Amelie was imprisoned and his daughter Marguerite was arrested and tortured by the Gestapo in 1944, narrowly escaping deportation ^[2].

By temperament Matisse was disciplined and reserved, closer to a methodical professional than to the bohemian stereotype. He worked on a fixed daily schedule, kept an aviary of exotic birds, and collected textiles throughout his life. His long rivalry and friendship with Picasso, thirty years of mutual watching, borrowing, and respect, is one of the celebrated relationships of modern art, and each man acknowledged the other as his only true peer ^[8].

In January 1941 Matisse underwent surgery for abdominal cancer in Lyon. He survived, but complications left him largely confined to bed or a wheelchair for the rest of his life ^[1]. He called the years that followed a second life, and instead of retreating he invented a new medium. With scissors and sheets of paper painted with gouache by assistants, he cut shapes directly, describing the process as drawing with scissors and carving into color. The results, the celebrated cut-outs, occupied his final thirteen years ^[7].

The book Jazz, published by Teriade in 1947, reproduced twenty of these compositions alongside the artist's handwritten reflections and brought the new method to a wide public ^[7]. Larger works followed: The Snail and Memory of Oceania in 1953, and the immense Swimming Pool, made to wrap around the walls of his dining room in Nice. Late honors included the grand prize for painting at the 1950 Venice Biennale ^[1].

His last great project was architectural. Between 1948 and 1951 he designed the Chapelle du Rosaire at Vence for a Dominican community, taking responsibility for everything from the stained glass and ceramic murals to the vestments and altar furnishings. Matisse, who was not conventionally religious, called the chapel the masterpiece of his life ^[3]. He died of a heart attack in Nice on November 3, 1954, at the age of 84, and was buried at Cimiez, in the hills above the city ^[1].

Few careers changed painting as thoroughly. Matisse demonstrated that color could organize a picture on its own terms, independent of description, and that decorative flatness could be a vehicle for serious feeling rather than a limitation. Generations of artists absorbed the lesson, from the American abstract painters of the 1950s and the color field painters who followed, to designers and illustrators who still borrow the vocabulary of the cut-outs ^[7].

His works anchor major museum collections worldwide. The Hermitage and the Pushkin Museum hold the Shchukin and Morozov purchases, the Museum of Modern Art in New York owns The Red Studio, Dance (I), and The Swimming Pool, and the Baltimore Museum of Art houses the vast Cone Collection assembled by the sisters Claribel and Etta Cone, who bought from Matisse for decades ^[7]. Two French museums are devoted entirely to him: the Musee Matisse in his birthplace at Le Cateau-Cambresis, founded by the artist himself in 1952, and the Musee Matisse in Nice, near his grave at Cimiez ^[9].

Among the more striking Henri Matisse facts is the endurance of his late style: the 2014 exhibition of the cut-outs at Tate Modern in London and the Museum of Modern Art drew record crowds, more than half a century after his death ^[10]. At auction his paintings have sold for tens of millions of dollars, but the deeper measure of his legacy is simpler. When historians pair him with Picasso as the twin poles of twentieth century art, Matisse represents the pole of harmony, order, and chromatic joy, an art he once hoped would offer the viewer rest, like a good armchair after a long day ^[8].